http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/7/hs729a.htm

On Long Island, Nazism invaded Yaphank in the form of a summer retreat called Camp Siegfreid.



An undated photo at Camp Siegfried shows the swastika and the salute, familiar Nazi symbols, on display.

Located on a wooded lakefront near the mid-Suffolk village, the camp was ostensibly a summer place for youngsters and a weekend campground for adults. In reality it was more dangerous -- a project sponsored by the German-American Bund, which had been established to promote Hitlerism in this country.

When the lakefront campsite opened in mid-1935, it was known, innocuously enough, as the ``Friends of New Germany Picnic Grounds,'' sponsored by the so-called German-American Settlement League.

But the following summer, the name was changed to Camp Siegfried, after the legend of the medieval Germanic warrior, one of the heroic myths adopted by the Nazis.

The bund, organized in 1936, had evolved from a series of nationwide German-American groups formed after World War I. The Free Society of Teutonia was organized in 1924, followed by the Friends of the Hitler Movement and the Friends of the New Germany.

At the camp, Fritz Kuhn, a U.S. citizen who headed the bund, predicted that someday he would be ``America's Fuhrer,'' Miller wrote. Activities included more than sports and sunbathing. There were recorded operas by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, and anti-Semitic lectures by Walter Kappe, the camp's propaganda chief. Kappe argued that Jews were the founders of international communism. The Friends of the New Germany in America would become ``what the Storm Troopers were in Germany,'' he promised.

By 1937, up to 40,000 bundists would arrive on Sundays to celebrate Nazism in America, while young Siegfrieders lined up to greet them as the train pulled into Yaphank.



Fritz Kuhn, center foreground, and others of the German-American Bund meet Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Kuhn was quoted as predicting he would be ``America's Fuhrer.''

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More on the Bund in the USA:

http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x08/xr0805.html

German American Bund Activities

Actual membership figures for the G - A Bund, are not known with any certainty, but reliable estimates place membership at 25,000 dues paying members, including some 8,000 uniformed Storm Troopers. The G - A Bund carried out active propaganda for its causes, published magazines and brochures, organized demonstrations and maintained a number of youth camps run along the lines of the HITLERJUGEND (Hitler Youth). G - A Bund activities often led to clashes with other groups, most notably with Jewish veterans of the First World War, leading to numerous street clashes. A February 1939 rally of the G - A Bund in Madison Square Garden drew a crowd of 20,000 who consistently booed the American president and chanted the Nazi Heil Hitler. The G - A Bund closely cooperated with the "Christian Front" organized by the antisemitic priest, Father Charles COUGHLIN.

More:


http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930sp5.html

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Hey Kai I'm from Long Island, born and raised and I've seen the effects on some of the school districts. There is a picture in the Life: World War Two book that shows a parade of "Nazis", in uniform carrying a swastika in Yaphank, protesting the war against Nazism in Germany. [img]graemlins/no.gif[/img]

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Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it- Sun Tzu

Thanx Onthefield!

Anyway, it is "interesting" to see how Hitler´s ideas did get across the ocean... Quite unbelievable in my opinion...

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Kai, we shouldn't forget that almost every country during the 1930s had its fascist or extreme right political groups... However, those groups needed special ground for the seed to grow... Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Germany, Japan, Austria, Spain... Fortunately, the USA, France and Great Britain stayed out of that b*llsh*t!

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"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun